November 1st, 2009

Making Apple's Magic Mouse and Wireless Keyboard work in Windows

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 9:39 pm

Categories: Bluetooth, Boot Camp, Windows

Tags: Mouse, Wireless Keyboard, Apple Inc., Wireless, Keyboards, Microsoft Windows, Mice, Hardware, Peripherals, Operating Systems

A recent Apple Support Note says that “certain features” on the new Magic Mouse and the Apple Wireless keyboard are having trouble in Windows on Boot Camp.  A fix was posted for downloading late last week.

Certain features such as up-down scrolling on the Apple Magic Mouse and brightness controls, volume controls, the Eject key, and the key combination Control-Alt-Delete on the Apple Wireless Keyboard (2009) may not work with Boot Camp.

The fix is the Bluetooth Update 1.0 for Windows and must be downloaded to your copy of Windows XP or Vista running in Boot Camp. Hey, not a word about System 7.

May 25th, 2009

iPhone: the greatest mobile fingerpainting platform?

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 2:56 pm

Categories: 3G, App Store, Boot Camp, WWDC, Windows Mobile, iPhone, iPhone SDK

Tags: Apple iPhone, Apple Macintosh, Mobile, Desktops, Hardware, David Morgenstern

In yet another example of amazing iPhone apps (and amazing users), an artist paints the coming week’s cover of the New Yorker magazine with his iPhone. And the story also points out how far Apple’s competition has to climb to even come close.

The artist is Jorge Colombo, who used Steve Sprang’s $4.99 Brushes app to create the cover art. He also is selling limited-edition “iSketches,” hardcopy prints made with archival inks.

Another app can create a flipbook movie of the making of the painting, which you can see at the bottom of this New Yorker blog posting.

What comes to mind here is that anyone who uses the words “iPhone killer” when referring to an iPhone competitor should watch this video and really think hard about the iPhone ecology before hitting the publish button.

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February 5th, 2008

Will Microsoft support Windows on Macs?

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 6:15 pm

Categories: Boot Camp, Microsoft, Vista, Windows

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Corp., InfoWorld, Microsoft Windows, Desktops, Operating Systems, Software, Hardware, David Morgenstern

A rumor posted Tuesday on a Microsoft enthusiast site suggests that Redmond will support Windows running on Intel-based Macs in BootCamp.

According to poster Sumeeth Evans, “… Papa Microsoft has had a change of heart and is is extending a helping hand to those Mac users who still have a soft spot for Windows.”

While you may have to keep a few grains of salt nearby for this one, it appears as though internal emails are going out to Microsoft support techs informing them that the company is going to changing it’s stance on issuing support for copies of Windows that are installed on Apple computers using the Bootcamp software available with OS X.

Microsoft press handlers worked all day long to bring me a response on this rumor, but by the end of the day, it seems that the person with the necessary information couldn’t be brought to the phone (or to his/her keyboard).

Now, I would guess that this support — if it happens — would fall under Microsoft’s usual Windows support organization and not with the Mac Business Unit. Its all about Windows. Still, in many companies whenever the word “Macintosh” is brought up, all questions go to the “Mac guys.”

At the same time, this rumor makes a lot of sense, after all, when running under Boot Camp, the Mac isn’t really a Mac anymore. The Mac becomes another Intel PC. And the solution does require customers to purchase a legit copy of Windows; Boot Camp currently supports Windows XP and Vista.

In addition, Microsoft could determine which Apple machines it would support and which version of Windows and the Mac OS it would support. For example, it could limit support to Vista instead of Windows XP, or support Leopard and not Tiger.

Of course, this is exactly what Mac users don’t want. My guess is that Mac users would want support for Windows XP rather than Vista (like most Windows users) and on both Leopard and Tiger.

If the support is for Windows XP, then Mac users will have to hurry up and buy a copy. There’s only 145 days left before Microsoft ends the OEM and shrinkwrap licenses for Windows XP. Infoworld has a Save XP petition drive going. The blog there says that almost 76,000 persons have signed up.

On the other hand, I have a question about Evans’ calling Microsoft “Papa.” Is the company a daddy or a mommy? Or something much, much different?

December 19th, 2007

Parallels, VMware Fusion, Boot Camp battle in real-world tests

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 12:47 pm

Categories: Boot Camp, Mac OS, Vista, Windows

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Performance, Microsoft Windows Vista, VMware Inc., Parallels, Entourage, Microsoft Windows, Virtualization, Apple Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn)

A fresh review of Windows virtualization products for Mac OS X machines reports that Parallels was faster in accomplishing a wide number of common business and user tasks with Windows XP, as VMware Fusion moved ahead with Windows Vista.

The review was performed by MacTech Labs for an upcoming issue of MacTech magazine. The testing compared an Intel Core Duo-based PC notebook running Windows XP (Fujitsu Lifebook A6025) with a MacBook, a MacBook Pro, and a Mac Pro running either Boot Camp, Parallels and VMware Fusion. It’s very interesting reading.

The testing was mostly about real-world use of the computers including one-step tasks such as launching apps and scrolling in documents; and sets of tasks where the user would open documents in one OS and use them in another. The team ran benchmarks but decided that the results were all wrong and focused on the real-world performance.

The applications tested included most of the Microsoft Office suite and Outlook, which the testers noted was an applications that has no real equivalent on the Mac.

Entourage is of course available, but it is not a “Mac version of Outlook”. As a result, many people are tied to Outlook use for corporate environments or because it has some specific feature set they need. Virtualization provides the perfect solution for this type of environment.

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August 27th, 2007

Think twice about tweaking Mac hardware from Windows

Posted by David Morgenstern @ 10:33 pm

Categories: Boot Camp, Firmware, Hack, Hard drive, Mac Pro, Windows

Tags: Hard Drive, Apple Macintosh, PC, Storage, Apple Inc., Microsoft Windows, Hardware, DMA, David Morgenstern

I noticed a tip in several blogs last week about tweaking hard drive memory settings from within Windows when running under Boot Camp. As far as I can see, the tip originates from a blogger named LamboMan from Bristol, England.

His suggestion concerns Boot Camp performance on the Mac Pro workstations. Intel Macs use Extensible Firmware Interface for boot services, rather than the old PC BIOS. However, Windows wants a BIOS, so that’s emulated.

According to LamboMan, the current BIOS emulation for the Mac Pro doesn’t support some modern memory handling available on hard drives, slowing performance.

But, when it comes to all Mac systems, disk access is very slow on them. This is because data transfers between memory and hard drives are currently done with PIO, or Programmed Input/Output. This is not as fast as the more modern technology known as DMA, or Direct Memory Access. DMA is much faster than PIO. Luckily, there is a fix. If you go into the Windows Device Manager, and look under the advanced settings tab, there will be an option to an Enable DMA.

Now, I would tell you that this is something that you shouldn’t do. I won’t do this.

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June 13th, 2007

"Sleep Camp" nixed, you still have to reboot

Posted by Jason D. O'Grady @ 6:11 am

Categories: Boot Camp, Intel, Software, WWDC, Windows

Tags: Apple Mac OS, Apple Macintosh, Apple Inc., Microsoft Windows, Jason D. O'Grady

There was some pretty exciting news that came out of WWDC yesterday about Boot Camp, Apple’s Windows/Mac dual boot architecture for Intel-based machines. According to an early version of Apple’s updated Boot Camp page the company changed the technology dramatically for the upcoming release of Mac OS 10.5/Leopard.

Rather than having to shut down the entire Mac OS and and cold boot into Windows (a lengthy process of between 15 and 20 minutes at times), Boot Camp was changed so that you could simply “sleep” Mac OS and log into Windows:

Leopard brings a quicker way to switch between Mac OS X and Windows: Just choose the new Apple menu item “Restart in Windows.” Your Mac goes into “safe sleep” so that when you return, you’ll be right where you were. It’s much faster than restarting the computer each time. Likewise, a “Restart in Mac OS X” menu item in the Boot Camp System Tray in Windows makes for a faster return to Mac OS X. With Windows hibernation enabled, you can pick up where you left off.

In an unusual move, Apple has seemingly pulled the “faster restarts” feature and removed it entirely from the Boot Camp page. MacRumors has posted the original page from the Google cache.

The feature was halfway to fully virtualizing Boot Camp (Virtual Camp?) like I suggested might do in my pre-WWDC predictions piece.

So why did Apple kill off Sleep Camp?

Was it because Boot Camp program manager “freaked out?” Or did Parallels and VMWare cry foul that Apple was stealing their third party developers technology? Will “Sleep Camp” come back for the final release of Leopard?

Conspiracy Theorists unite!